Posted
by
CowboyNeal
on Thursday November 07, 2002 @07:28AM
from the phun-with-physics dept.

ewhac writes "It seems a programmer named Jetro Lauha, for his submission to the Assembly 2002 competition, decided to explore the realm of solid body physics simulations. So he wrote Porrasturvat -- 'Stair Dismount'. The game involves the application of force vectors to solid bodies connected by links with constrained range of motion, and observing their impact forces against other objects in the environment. ...Or, more colloquially, you push a guy down the stairs and see how much damage he takes. Apparently, any similarity between this game and the Terrible Secret of Space is entirely coincidental."

You can get really high scores in this game by finding the "bug": I'll keep the hint minimal, but if you push hard on his foot, and try to push it down and back into the stairs, there's a chance he'll get stuck for a few seconds... resulting in very high scores.

You can get really high scores in this game by finding the "bug": I'll keep the hint minimal, but if you push hard on his foot, and try to push it down and back into the stairs, there's a chance he'll get stuck for a few seconds... resulting in very high scores.

Do not listen to him, he is mistaken.

You should _shove_ hard on his foot. Shove it down and back into the stairs. I am the pusher robot.

And that's not the only way you can get some funny scores with. For example, one dude wrote an extra application called "brutalizer" which poked straight inside the running game to change the hit force to some ridiculous amounts..

You get an even better score by whapping the guy upside the head at a sharp angle. (The simulation runs slow as hell on my P133, but I swear it was the most entertaining 15 minutes of my week so far!) The jazzy music goes well with the crunching and grunting sound effects!

May as well make this into the official high-scrore thread. No cheating guys!

Heading is at or very close to 180. pitch between 80-85target: foot.full force

I found best at 179.62 and 81.06 full force, got 40,000 before I left the first step

Doesn't happen every time, and you can tell if you've got it by looking at his leg of the foot you hit. If its hasn't got atleast 10,000 before he gets off the first 2 steps, reset, try again. Vary the verticle angle, use the arrow keys, small increments. It needs to be full force, (or within 2 bars)

Wow, I thought 122000 was good. I fluked out and had him hit his head twice. The second time, his whole body landed on it, and I got about 80,000 points on that one hit. (The head appeared to fly right off his body momentarily!)

This is right up there with a phone conversation which included the phrase "Where did I leave my pants?" and the other fellow said that sounded like one of those games from that outfit that does the really-dumb-but-fun-once games:)

Damnit man!! I was just discussing doing that very thing with the guys at work, and here I find somebody else thought of it first. I've never done any mod work, but I'll certainly look into it this weekend. If anybody has done anything before, let me know-- I'm happy to help anywhere, and grateful for advice/examples to work from.

If only he didn't try knocking his Mum down the stairs on the day that Death was incapacitated due to a twisted ankle. Although sawing the leg off the Armoir (making it fall on top of her) and the grenade to finish things off would have been another simulation in itself!

Or, more colloquially, you push a guy down the stairs and see how much damage he takes

I actually have played that game a couple of times, and now you pushed the website down the stairs with the/. effect! What do you expect I will do with my obsession to push people, when I next take the stair down to leave the office:)

more colloquially, you push a guy down the stairs and see how much damage he takes

Are they looking for any new people? I would not mind pushing people as a full time job. I can already image the job. Some dipshit says "Please do not push me down the stairs again, I fell 6 times already today and I am bleeding." My response "Shutup" *PUSH*.... *boom* *bang* *ding-dang*...

Iniaes: What kind of bot would you like to see?You: Bukakke bot!Iniaes: I only hear that type of response less than five percent of the time.

*2 minutes go by*Iniaes: He probably just wants to take over my cells and then explode inside me like a barrel of runny chopped liver! Or maybe he'd like to psychologically terrorise me until I have no objection to a right-wing military takeover of my apartment! I guess I should call Al Pacino! You: Hi Al Pacino. Iniaes: Hi there, Bill gates. Can you rephrase that with fewer ideas, or different thoughts? You: Bill Gates Loves Bukkake Iniaes: I know he's rich... but I didn't know he loves bukkake .

You: Have you ever seen Natalie Portman Iniaes: Nope... I haven't seen it. What's it like? You: She's hot, and petrified. Iniaes: hot and petrified is she? You: Yes, Yoda says. Iniaes: I see. Civilization is fun! Anyway, it keeps me busy!!! You: What the fark? Start making sense. Iniaes: Try expressing yourself another way. I started without you. You: Look. Start saying amusing things or this'll get modded down even further on Slashdot. Iniaes: My eyes aren't attached right now. I started without you. You: I'M GOING TO RAPE YOU AND THEN KILL YOU, YOU STUPID LITTLE BUNCH OF INSIGNIFICANT CODE... Iniaes: Do you think your plan will succeed? You: Yes, thanks for asking. Iniaes: And? It was nothing. You: I give up. Iniaes: You surrender? You: Yes, I'm French Iniaes: Go on... Are you from Canada or France? You: France numbnuts, I just surrendered!Iniaes: What's your favorite part of France? You: I want to kill you for being an idiot. Iniaes: I believe that killing is morally objectionable. It's kinda hard to reconcile that with my primary purpose, which is to push humans down the stairs.

See? It all goes back to the fact that the DAMN BOT WANTS TO PUSH ME DOWN THE STAIRS!!!

The game score was hacked pretty quickly after release of the game.. easiest way being to fiddle with the values straight to the memory when the game is running (trying to change the saved scores or online submit data should be a bit harder).

If I get around taking time for the project, I'll be adding some more obfuscation for those things (as if that would help any;-). Checking the hit on server side takes a LOT of cpu time but I guess some system for validating top entries could be viable.

I am achieving scores >60K just by pushing the guy with full force with the initial settings (0,0). I once got >70K but at exactly that time i figured this bug... if you run the prog from a schortcut placed say on the desktop the internal scores tables aren't updated:(

anyway it wouldn't be hard to make the online score database bullet proof. just have the initial conditions uploaded together with the score:))

The parent article is quite correct. If you're doing any solid-body physics based stuff, ODE rocks. Combine it with SDL [libsdl.org] and OSG [openscenegraph.org] and you have the basic tools to produce some really cool stuff. Throw in the Demeter Terrain Engine [terrainengine.com] if you want a bit of scenery to go with it. I've tied all four together for experimenting with what makes a good driver interface for a hovertank.:)

The Stair-dismount makes good use of joints, and collision detection features of ODE - but even if you don't need these, the force model of ODE is a lot of fun to play with on its own. But if you *are* ambitious, it has specialised joint and suspension-spring models for doing things like wheeled vehicles pretty easily.

With all these tools available under LGPL, those of you like me - who don't like writing a graphics/physics engine so much as actually writing cool simulations with said engines - have a much better point to start from than even 2 years ago.

Pontifex [chroniclogic.com] is great. And the new version (Pontifex II) is coming out from Linux Real Soon Now. I've been testing the Linux release for the last few days, and while it has rough edges, it's still alot of fun.

i was hoping this would be like a stairwell, where you had to angle the guy around the corner to get to the next set of stairs.... or maybe knock him upwards so he "grinds" on the hand rail.... that'd be pretty sweet. still, a really fun game, even if it does render horrendously slowly on a meager K6-2 300. the slow mo sure is entertaining, though.

in this version the guy would fall down the stairs, off a ledge onto another flight of stairs, out a window, do a 10 story swan dive to the pavement below... i don't know where it would go from there however..

Well duh!

At that point a schoolbus full of kids would come down the road and bash him into an open manhole into the subway system where he'd get hit by the F-train. If you time it just right he'll get dragged along by the train and up onto some elevated track where he'd fly off with enough force to crash through the window of the Acme Rocket-Powered rollerskate factory...

Animats.com [animats.com] claims a patent [animats.com] on "falling bodies". As they say, "If it falls, it has joints, it looks right, and it works right, it's probably covered by our patent." Gotta love that patent system...

If you push him backwards on his head so that he lands on the platform, you can get him to land on his neck and the rest of his body to hinge over him, while pressing on his neck (camera "1" is good for this).

It seems the score is derived mainly from how hard the body part initially hits, not the strain and angle to which the body part is pressed while it's in contact with the ground? One would think a pleasing neck-snap should yield the highest scores...

This is the best game ever. This is the best game ever. EVAR!!!11 I would happily pay money for future versions. Make it more sporting. Include different geography. Level 1, the simple residential flight of stairs. Level 10, the stairwell of a three story office building. The method for determining injuries is good, but it could be better. Others pointed out that its all impact; include strain and compression. Limit the joints range of motion a little bit. (Oh no, boss is coming!)

(He's gone, shew.) Handrails and doorknobs would be a plus. You could include some quirky plot, make it like Thief. You have to sneak around the office, driven by some unexplainable urge to shove people down stairs. Leave it unexplainable and focus on gameplay. If there's a witness, you get caught, game over. If the victim isn't hit hard enough in the head, he can tell people what happened, game over. And of course, powerups!

Object: Application of network traffic vectors to physical web servers connected by links with constrained bandwidth resources, and observing their impact against response time. Or, more colloquially... you push a million/. readers at a website and see how much damage it takes.

(Most of these videos are encoded with the Intel Indeo codec, which Intel discontinued, but you can still get it from Ligos. [ligos.com] I should convert that material to another codec. What would you suggest that will work five years from now?)

I was the first to simulate falling downstairs. I first showed "Falling Bodies" at the Softimage user convention in 1997. [... ]

It's unclear whether you're laying claim to human forms falling down stairs, or any object falling down stairs, but I was watching stuff fall down stairs at SIGGRAPH in 1987, ten years earlier.

I'm pretty sure the research was peformed by MIT. I saw renderings of a vase, a toy car, and a park bench fall down stairs. I also saw a bunch of rigid soccer balls bouncing against each other and the environment. The techniques were published in the proceedings that year.

Human forms. People had been banging blocks around for years. But getting the hard cases to work for articulated dynamics was tough. It still is; most of the systems that will do it still don't get it quite right.

I have made a couple of the more popular mixes made of the Terrible Secret of Space (Down the Stairs Mix [kilna.com], Protected Mix [kilna.com]). The guy who did the original song truly is the Laziest Man on Mars, I've been pestering him since Terrible's heyday to add me to his MP3.com page [mp3.com]. If he thought my stuff sucked all that bad, he could at least compose a two word "fuck off" email.:) In other news, my my sig is eerily on-topic today.

Assembly language is nearly as close to programming in the language computers actually speak as possibly, short of actually writing your code in binary or hexadecimal. In a language like Basic or C, you're using a lot of predefined functions and tools (like Print, Goto, etc.); in Assembly, you write practically everything yourself.

Assembly code is incredibly fast, and massively time consuming to write. It is very un-portable, though... assembly code written for an Intel Pentium-class chip sometimes won't work on an AMD chip or even a Pentium IV.

If we just accept everything that works great on WINE, then why would anyone bother writing applications for linux?

Often, you can throw a programmer out of Windows, but you can't throw the Windows out of the programmer. A Windows app will in most cases recompile just fine for a *n?x system using Winelib. Thus, I accept Winelib as just another widget set, analogous to GTK+ or Qt.

The fellow will land on his can, flop back, and not move any further. Sometimes it looks like he'll start to ooze down the stairs, but the game usually decides he's not going to take any further damage and cuts out before anything more happens.